Metal militias

The wild kingdom of Scissorfight and Nightstick

by Carly Carioli

"On a recent sharkfishing excursion to southern Florida I ate alligator balls,"
begins a column in the latest edition of the locally produced metal 'zine
Hexbender, "or alligator nuggets, if you like." Prefaced with an
epigraph attributed to, of all people, Blue Öyster Cult guitarist Buck
Dharma ("Nature winds up the folly of men"), the column proceeds as a quick,
smart evisceration of several conventions: naturalist journal writing,
"adventure" travelogues, the ubiquitous local-character profiles found in
quaint seaside glossies. The author heads to the Everglades, where he boards a
hovercraft with two humorless German tourists and a loose cannon of a pilot
who's quoted in the author's description of a bloody wild-boar hunt to which
"he brings a staple gun along to `staple the hounds back together so they can
finish the chase!' "

The author of the column is named Ironlung -- which is also the name he uses
when fronting the low-riding metal band Scissorfight -- and the column, a
fictional endeavor, is titled "Ironlung's Wild America." I love the way
Ironlung quotes the fictional hovercraft pilot in his column: fractionally, as
if he had been working from the transcript of an actual interview that proved
too winding or long-winded to quote in full. The tale's exaggeration -- its
amplification and distortion -- is proclaimed right at the beginning,
established with a wink and a nudge. Ironlung gains your confidence by letting
you in on the joke at the outset, and so you're inclined to trust both the tale
and the teller, assured that you are in good hands, that he will pull your leg
but not yank it out of its socket.

The same promise holds true for Scissorfight, who always appear to have stepped
directly from some Hell's Angels version of a wilderness-survival camp. A
physically imposing specimen -- around six feet tall, bulging about the belly,
with a beard that puts ZZ Top to shame -- Ironlung resembles, more than a
little, the larger-than-life mountain men, pirate captains, and backwoods
rogues who populate his band's songs. He proclaims amplification and distortion
just by striding onto the stage; the snaking, detuned, intestine-emptying thud
that follows both confirms and refutes your suspicions. "It's not rock till you
piss your pants," went a chorus to a song called "Musk Ox" (off their recently
released third album, New Hampshire, on Tortuga), which they played in a
December 1 show at the Middle East. Or at least that's how it seemed to
go. "It's not rock till I piss you pants," Ironlung clarified
afterward, declining to elaborate further. (In a photo accompanying the latest
installment of "Ironlung's Wild America," he's festooned in another willful
decimation of grammar -- a T-shirt that says only "I Fucking You.")

Scissorfight's previous albums have steered a nebulous course through all
manner of tall tales -- some of the band's own devising (including their
signature local hit, "Planet of Ass"), some plucked from the rummage bin of
regional folklore ("The Gibbeted Captain Kidd"), some an impervious combination
of the two. Early on, says Andrew Schneider, who produced New Hampshire,
"I saw that Scissorfight were not just a metal band. In fact, they were way
more rock. So my main goal at first was to get some 'ZLX [the classic-rock
station] in there. And then the more I worked with them, the more I realized
that not only was it sort of a rock thing but that there were elements of Frank
Zappa in there, and elements of the Butthole Surfers, there's all this shit in
it. And Ironlung knows it: he hams it up, but he knows what he's doing. I don't
know if anyone else knows it."

Thanks in part to Schneider's production, New Hampshire is the
consummate Scissorfight album -- bookended by tributes to their adopted home
state ("Granite State Destroyer," which alludes to survivalist compounds, tax
revolt, and, of course, the state-license-plate slogan; and the closing
"Mountain Man Boogie"), it's a series of postcard-sized snapshots from an
outlaw state of mind. The rhythm section straightens out into a Zepplinesque
four-on-the-floor stomp, the riffs maintain a bulging, brontosauran beefiness
without turning to mud, and Schneider even coaxes the band into the occasional
three-part harmony. On "Lamprey River" and "Injection Site," searing slide
guitars and harmonica and Neil Young's Dead Man reverb conjure a more
successful version of what Clutch attempted on The Elephant Riders: a
bayou-bred swamp-boogie blues band, updated for the late `90s.

"The band originally started practicing in the basement of a house in
Newmarket," says Ironlung, who grew up in Newton. "And I drove every weekend up
to Portsmouth to practice in this meat locker that I couldn't even stand all
the way up in. I had a real stressful job, but then I'd have a license to do
whatever I wanted all weekend and then come back, and that was perfect. I went
to school up there for five years, and after a year of being in the band, I
moved up to Portsmouth for a couple of months. And it's always had for me,
having grown up in the city, this kind of mythos to it. It was where the
imagination ran wild, because there were the woods and all this mystery and
folklore -- you're in the woods, and what the fuck is out in the woods? If
you're from the city, it's also a place that you think of as an `other' -- I
think of it as this sort of Jungian mythic landscape where man is delivered
into another plane to contemplate . . . whatever. That's sort of
the theme of the album."

As a kid growing up in Weymouth, Robert Williams immersed himself in the
local theater. He was a founding member of the Company Theatre, which is now
based in Norwell, and he performed in the Boston Shakespeare Company before
taking, as he puts it, "a bad turn into rock and roll" precipitated by a Minor
Threat show at the old Gallery East. The band he formed in high school, Siege,
recorded a demo in the early '80s with Lou Giordano (Negative FX, SS Decontrol,
Proletariat). Siege played only a handful of shows, but the demo became a hit
in the international tape-trading network of underground hardcore fanatics and,
if you believe Napalm Death, was a primary influence on the development of the
subgenre known as grindcore. (The demo, called Drop Dead, was
re-released by Relapse in the mid '90s; the band also appeared on the highly
collectible compilation Cleansing the Bacteria that was released by the
skate-punk illustrator Pushead.) After Siege folded, in the early '80s,
Williams went on to Emerson College, where he hosted WERS's hardcore program
Faster Than You, a job he took over from Taang! founder Curtis Casella.
And then he dropped out of sight.

"I guess I can confess I was using drugs rather heavily and spent a period of
time on Cape Cod drying out," he acknowledges. And it was, of all things, his
return to theater that gave him the confidence and the currency to return to
Weymouth to make music. A brief Siege reunion followed in the early '90s --
with Anal Cunt's Seth Putnam on vocals -- but Williams, the drummer and
lyricist, became disillusioned when his "revolutionary" lyrics were, as he puts
it, "blanketed with pacifism." Whereupon he formed an entirely different sort
of band called Nightstick, whom I first saw perform on a bill with Japanese
noise terrors Masonna and Merzbow around 1995. Williams's favored description
for Nightstick, Flipper as fronted by Jim Morrison, was not far off -- if
either the Doors or Flipper had employed an "interpretive dancer" and maracas
player dressed as a clown who appeared to be in the throes of the DT shakes.
The guitar player smashed three guitars in the course of what appeared to be
one long, half-hour song infused with protean sludge and a tendency to radical
improvisation.

"We have a love," says Williams, "for what most people would refer to as
classic rock. When punk rock went into postpunk, like around the time of Sonic
Youth, I started listening to the kind of stuff I used to hate because everyone
else liked it -- like the Doors and Floyd -- and that was what led me to
explore the weirder psychedelic music and dig a little deeper -- like Vanilla
Fudge, etc. So it was only when punk rock became noisier and more psychedelic
that I began exploring the historic psychedelic music. Our concept is to
combine rock music with noise. That is our concept and our mission, and we have
coined the phrase `psychedelicore.' I feel we're arriving at something
completely original, as far as the degree and dose and helping of noise we
channel into quote-unquote rock form."

Beginning with 1996's Blotter, Nightstick have released three albums for
Relapse, despite several setbacks. The original clown, according to Williams,
became a homeless IV-drug addict and was replaced. As part of Williams's
crusade against "a suburban club scene retarded by cover-band mentality," the
band encountered some legal hassles when a battle-of-the-bands showcase they'd
infiltrated at a cover-band club erupted into a violent melee and the
proprietor was smashed in the face with a weighted mike stand. In an unrelated
incident, singer/bassist Alex Smith was also briefly incarcerated.

Nightstick's most recent album, Death to Music, isn't nearly the
amusical screed the title suggests. Noise, in their hands, is a matter of
texture, the grain of the music suggesting an overload of the circuitry
employed to record it -- a subtle but economical method of dramatizing a
rebellion against the constraints of technology and, in the process,
communicating the meltdown heat of the performance itself. Williams's mantra,
in conversation, is revolution, an attitude extrapolated from his fondness for
the Beats and the more militant wings of the civil-rights and anti-war
movements. And Nightstick's noise is of a similar vintage: Floyd's psychedelic
expansiveness, the second-hand free-jazz approximations of the MC5, and the
sprawling, flexible cacophony of Blue Cheer. In Nightstick's hands all this
unfurls at a snail's pace -- as with the Melvins and Flipper, there's a sense
that some heavy-machinery vehicle is inching down the highway, a sense of speed
in proportion to sturdy, if cumbersome, tonnage. Fu Manchu, Nebula, and Monster
Magnet have capitalized on similar reference points, but Nightstick's
formulation -- given to extended conceptual suites, relentless run-on dirges,
and the occasional free-form alto-sax squall -- remains delightfully esoteric.
In the midst of recording a new album, they'll give a rare performance next
Monday, December 20, at Bill's Bar.